Nobel Prize Recipient. Pavel Cherenkov received world-wide acclaim after being awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics. He shared jointly this award with Ilya M. Frank and Igor Tamm. These three Russian physicists received the award, according to the Nobel Prize Committee, "for the discovery and the interpretation of the Cherenkov Effect." He received 12 nominations for the Nobel candidacy. In 1934 Cherenkov, while still a doctorate student under S.I. Vavilov, discovered that bluish light is emitted when gamma rays pass through water. In countries that were behind the Iron Curtain in eastern Europe, the "Cherenkov Effect" is referred to as the Vavilov-Cherenkov Effect or Cherenkov Radiation. In 1937 Tamm and Frank explained this discovery as "the emission of light waves by electrically charged particles moving faster than the speed of light in a medium." Tamm developed this theory more fully in a paper published in 1939. Born the son of Russian peasants, his childhood was during tumultuous times in Russia. When he was two years old, his mother died, with his father soon remarrying. In 1938, his father became one of thousands of the fatalities of Joseph Stalin's political regime. In 1928 he graduated from Voronezh State University with a degree in mathematics and physics. In 1930 he accepted a post in Moscow at the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute, one of the leading Russian physics institutions, where Vavilov became the department head in 1934. His initial postgraduate work in optics was supervised by Vavilov. In 1940, he earned his doctorate in Physico-Mathematical Sciences. In 1953 he became a Professor of Experimental Physics. In 1959 he became department head of the photo-meso processes laboratory, remaining there for fourteen years. In 1970, he became an Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Besides the Nobel Prize, he along with Frank, Tamm, and Vavilov, were awarded State Prizes in 1946 for the Cherenkov Effect. He received a second State Prize in 1951. He married in 1930 and the couple had a son and a daughter. By the time of his death in 1990, Cherenkov had enjoyed a long and successful career that spanned six decades at the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute.